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PAX games

So… now I’m getting over my post-PAX cold (or “pax pox” as they call it)…. Let us talk games…. I got a chance to play a couple of new games (and see a few more), so here’s a quick rundown (in no particular order)

Probably my favourite game of PAX. A very nicely animated, cute little platformer. I like that there is no death, you respawn from a checkpoint. So that’s going to make it very friendly for MiniObsi to play too. The story is given to you as writing on the wall as you go. I like games that slowly reveal what’s going on like that, keeping you interested in finding out what’s going on as you play through.

It’s already released ($7.49) – I’ll be grabbing it when it’s on Steam, so help it get there by voting!

One of the Indy games I got most excited about would have been Influx. The basic idea is that you’re a ball, and you need to collect 3 of these firefly things as you cruise around, to open the glass box puzzles – where you need to move another ball into the marked spot. So it’s basically a physics puzzle game (which I’m sure everyone will say “like portal” – which it is and isn’t :)) I found the controls easy and the one level I played I found it sufficiently mind bending, and while I didn’t manage to finish it before though I’d better let someone else have a go – I could see what I had to do, so it was just a matter of getting there.

It’s already released ($9.95) which seems a fair price. It’s not yet on steam, so give them a hand with their greenlight!

This one looks cool. I didn’t play it but I watched it and chatted to the developer. Basically it’s multiplayer – you’re running around with a paint jun (that shoots a jet of paint, not like paint balls), and the idea is to paint the other players your colour to make them part of your team. The last person not converted is the winner. Apparently you can lob paint over walls and things, so there’s some strategy that can come into play as well. I can see this being a heap of silly fun, so I’ll be looking out for it. It’s still in early stages of development, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to try it out.

I didn’t get to play this one, but I watched others play it. There’s a short example video on their website. The game screen is broken up into “frames” and you can move these around, so that you can change the way your character moves through the space. It’s a very interesting concept, and seemed to work well and be interesting. Definitely something to keep an eye out for.

I quite liked this. The idea is that you’re a pizza delivery girl, running across rooftops to deliver the pizza within a certain time. I think it would be a fun little game to play when you’re just after something to fill in some time. It’s not released yet and I’m not sure what their plans are for releasing on PC over tablets, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Again not one I played, but saw and chatted to the guy about – these guys are making old “Game & Watch” style games from modern games! They had “Game of Watchcraft” on display. They said they wanted to make GTA but Rockstar was being problematic – Boo Hiss! It will be interesting to see where these guys go with it. Sadly it’s only for ipad, so that rules me out anyway, but it’s still interesting anyway.

Didn’t impress me…..at all….. Perhaps that was because I went over and grabbed the controller and started playing – and had no idea what was going on or what to do – there were no instructions…. The developer was standing behind me and didn’t say anything. Then after a while he started talking to someone else who had just walked up and was watching, telling them how the game worked! I made some comment that I was listening in because I had no idea what this game was about or how to play it, and his reply was something along the lines of “ohh yeah, we should have put some sort of instructions in there” – and then kept talking to that other person rather than to me who was actually playing it.

I’d figured out you move around the screen and don’t want to touch the other spermy thing or you die… One of the buttons gave you a pulse type effect that seemed to push those bad ones away, but I couldn’t work out what the actual aim of the game was. In the end I had to ask, and he said “just survive”. So I don’t know if their focus is letting the player figure it all out themselves, or if he was just being unhelpful – but it didn’t engage me, he wouldn’t give any useful instruction (unlike every other developer whose games I played, who were interested in you playing and enjoying their games)…. so meh

I didn’t play this one either, but I grabbed a card for it because it looked slightly interesting as I walked past. Looking at the site, it looks more interesting than I’d originally thought, so I wish I’d stopped in to have a go – that’s the problem with not having an interesting enough looking booth with a game that has basic graphics – so many other things to see, people are likely to walk past if it’s not eye catching enough. So it seems the basic premise is you’re a spy and have to hack into computer terminals without being seen. I’m not sure it’s something I’d pay much money for, but I’d probably give it a go if it was $5 or so.

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Rayman – Not sure which one it was, but I wasn’t really impressed. It looked good, but we were playing 2 player (the woman running the stall and me), and whenever I died, I was turned into a bubble and had to float over to her so she could bring me back to life – It just seemed a needlessly annoying way of doing things, so I gave up playing.

I think it’s only for tabs and the like, so that makes it out for me. An interesting one of those perpetually running forward games, where you can only move sideways and jump – but you’re a ninja, fighting zombies. I felt like a noob since I couldn’t work out how to jump up onto buildings and kept falling into the lava, so I found it frustrating. But it was an interesting concept and pretty cool.

We’d been eager to try the Oculus Rift 3D glasses with this game, but I was quite disappointed. The world looked stunning! But I didn’t really like some aspects of the gameplay. I started out with the normal screen and controls way to play, as an Ent (tree). Who was big, clunky, slow and annoying to control. It would get stuck in trees and because you’re then looking more top-down because it’s a large character, the trees blocked a lot of view and made it harder to navigate, because you’re then a branchy tree stuck in a branchy tree….. I wasn’t told any objective to the game, but I heard the Devs saying something about that you’ll be in the world with other people and there will be helping each other to solve puzzles or something. So not sure if that is good or bad. Exploring the world on your own would be interesting, but I guess boring after a while with nothing to do. So I guess it needs the multiplayer, but not sure how irritating that would be unless you’re playing with friends.

When I had a go with the Oculus Rift glasses I was really disappointed. While it was awesome to be able to actually look around – to turn my head to see what was going on – and it felt very “real” – It was hard for the eyes to focus, and the picture was really pixellated, which ruined the look of the fantastic world you’d seen on the monitor. I couldn’t work out how to turn around and go back where I came, without turning my whole body around (and thus wrapping myself in cables)… so I ended up just going straight. The Ent lumbered along, but the elves (or whatever they were) handled much better. Standing to play was really disorientating, I kept feeling like I was going to fall over, so sitting would have been better. It’s a very interesting idea, and looks lovely without the Oculus. I don’t know if it’s a limitation in the Oculus or the game, but I found the 3D just didn’t work well enough.

Yet another I didn’t play but watched and chatted to the developer…. This one is stunning! From what I saw, you’re in an underwater world, and the idea is to make music as you swim around. It’s designed so that each time you play through it will be different and you can effectively make songs by shaping the music how you want it. I can’t say the idea of the music side interests me much, but the swimming around through the landscape looks very cool. It will be interesting to see what this game is like when it’s more developed.

I didn’t play it, but I saw them do a playthrough on the big screen and talk about it. It looks great and I’ve enjoyed other Splinter Cell games. This one seems to add a bit more complexity to it from the ones I’ve played – as they are tracking your play style and awarding points.

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Saints Row IV

The version without the anal probes 😛 (shame, launching people with that sounded fun :P) We only got a tiny amount of time to play and the queues were too long to bother with another go – But from the bit I could make out….. very different to Saints Row 3 – since you now have superpowers… I had the ability to sort of glide/fly. .. and scale buildings by just pressing jump while running up the wall….. Things to collect on the roofs of buildings that I didn’t quite have time to understand. There was a purple lightsaber (though they called it something else) which I might have audibly squeeeed at when I saw it (everyone would have had headphones on so that was ok)…. and promptly selected it and began to hackyslash around the streets, as you do. Then I stumbled across some sort of race thing, where I was running around from market to marker – then my time was up. So it looks good – graphics were good, the gameplay was a bit stuttered and mine kept losing sound, which I presume was just their systems.

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… and I think that was all….

(Ohh there was one other game I played but it was stupid/boring and I don’t know the name of it :P)